Intel Reports Full-Year Revenue of $55.4 Billion, Net Income of $11.4 Billion

Good lawd that's a lot of money!

Gee it's good to have no real competition in the market. If AMD upped their game we would probably pay 50% less.

Rahh said:

Good lawd that's a lot of money!

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For the chip business it certainly is.

B00nie said:

Gee it's good to have no real competition in the market. If AMD upped their game we would probably pay 50% less.

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Intel has plenty of competition because Intel is in several markets. They don't have them all as locked down as they do the PC chip market.

AMD has never been a real threat to Intel not even when Thunderbirds were rocking the PC market and Opterons were gaining noticeable market share in the server market. Many people wondered why Intel never really set out to crush AMD even when they had a good chance to, well it's cause it would have done more harm then good.

The way I see it, AMD is in a weakened position today not because of Intel but because of AMD and their own poor business choices. They started believing their own shit, they started thinking that the technological progress of their products would carry them through risky business decisions against competitors like Intel who are completely solvent and occupy entrenched positions in the business world.

Today Opterons are disappearing out of server rooms and developers are getting tired of the trouble and expense involved with coding to support different processor architectures, it's an expense they don't want to have to carry. It's wasteful to them. I learned long ago with the Amiga, the best computer in the world is useless without useful software applications to run on it. The Amiga with the Motorola 68000 chips were way beyond anything Intel, AMD or anyone else had going. It was also the big chip for early Apple's at that time. I still find it amazing that Steve Jobs managed to flourish with essentially a monochrome version of the Amiga which was running something over 4000 colors while others were still running eight colors.

It was because of the lack of business application software support and the Commodore name, so strongly associated with the Commodore64 which was sold in toy stores, that the Amiga started getting a reputation as a gaming computer. It goes without saying that a computer that can handle high end graphics is a computer with exceptional math computational power, but in the end, without the business software to back it, the machine is not a business machine regardless of it's hardware capability.

I'm rambling.

B00nie said:

Gee it's good to have no real competition in the market. If AMD upped their game we would probably pay 50% less.

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Competition shouldn't necessarily mean a race to the bottom in price but a race to the top in performance (especially in the chip arena) ... when AMD had the Athlon competing against the Intel Netburst they still charged a premium for the high end Athlon chips ... Intel was forced into the lower value segment due to performance gaps (the same place AMD is now)

A healthy chip market should offer a range of products across the full segment spectrum:

- Value
- Performance
- Mobile/Low power/high efficiency
- Server (Value, Performance, etc)

Low priced competition might benefit the consumer for a brief time but it could have longer term negative repercussions due to the lower R&D budgets or incentive for innovation in the value segment

lcpiper said:

Many people wondered why Intel never really set out to crush AMD even when they had a good chance to, well it's cause it would have done more harm then good.

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Is this revisionist history or something? You're talking pre-Athlon days. Afterwards, Intel was breaking the law left and right, offering chips below costs or at massive discounts to major vendors like Dell, HP, Compaq globally on the condition they NOT buy AMD chips. I mean they didn't get fined by the European Trade Comission, investigated by the FTC, and found guilty by the Japan Fair Trade Commission for nothing. They were engaged in predatory practices that were illegal in many countries they were operating in. AMD's gain in marketshare didn't happen until Would AMD have failed anyway? Maybe, they made bad decisions also, but saying Intel never tried to crush them is like saying the Europeans never tried to wipe out the Indians. Maybe you can find a graph illustrating things, but I'm pretty sure AMD gained no marketshare (at least in desktops) during the time Intel was breaking the law, that didn't happen until afterwards.

I'm didn't specify. You are right, I do remember some of those investigations. At the same time, I was not talking pre-athelon days, I actually had the Northwood days in mind, when Intel had such a superior product that AMD was just not in the same league anymore. Of course perhaps Intel was wary of getting caught like they had previously and just decided to play it cool since they had the upper hand.

But tell me, in the cases you mention above, are they an example of Intel trying to crush AMD, or just trying to keep their market share in the face of an AMD offensive?

lcpiper said:

I'm didn't specify. You are right, I do remember some of those investigations. At the same time, I was not talking pre-athelon days, I actually had the Northwood days in mind, when Intel had such a superior product that AMD was just not in the same league anymore. Of course perhaps Intel was wary of getting caught like they had previously and just decided to play it cool since they had the upper hand.

But tell me, in the cases you mention above, are they an example of Intel trying to crush AMD, or just trying to keep their market share in the face of an AMD offensive?

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Yeah the Athlon was a situation where AMD actually had the superior product and Intel ended up behind for several years. It's probably something we'll never see again.

As for trying to crush them v. maintain marketshare, it's some of both. Intel never wants AMD gone completely, but only nipping at their heels enough so that they can make an argument against anti-trust allegations, because they have a "competitor." They just don't want an ACTUAL competitor. I don't see how you can chalk this up as "just" trying to keep their marketshare in light of two things:

1. They were setting up contracts with vendors that specifically forbade them from buying from or exceeding purchasing certain volumes from AMD. AMD was the target.

2. They were breaking laws. They recognized that if they could squash this early, it would pay off much more later, which it did. That goes way beyond smart marketing or promotions to keep your product relevant. That's trying to stop your competition any way you can.

If they were talking

Urg, no edit. ignore that bottom line.